Contemporary fiction. Ethics. Literary criticism.

There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he’d always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered –as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. (p.239)

This moment in Neuromancer is the description of the protagonist Case encountering a cyber-version of his murdered girlfriend, Linda Lee. It comes as the result of Case’s most prolonged “flat-lining” episode having been “jacked-in” to cyberspace – he arrives in a kind of digital-mental purgatory created by the AI Neuromancer. Case works out where he is, has sex with Linda, and then refuses Neuromancer’s offer of eternal digital life, beginning the narrative climax of the novel. This passage serves to emphasize, I think, how digital textuality in Neuromancer in-fact reproduces a hierarchy of reality over virtuality, one which retains the security of a heterosexual, masculine subject in the face of ontological uncertainty effectively navigated by Harawayan cyborg-female subjects such as Linda and Molly. When the concept of the cyborg as a radical imaginary becomes most pronounced, the novel draws back from it, unable to embrace a feminine irony, incoherence and uncertainty.

The desire Case feels for Linda in the encoded cyber-memory where he sees her is made-up of contradiction and irony. It weighs physically (“she pulled him down”) but it is also a technology, a “sea of information coded” which is simultaneously read as biological or “natural” (“pheromone.”) It is a then “drive”, understood in a paradoxical sense, “beyond knowing” but “read” by the body in a “strong” and “blind” process. The desire located in the body is seemingly unknowable information, both technological and “natural”, digital and physical. The passage works initially to create an uncertainty about the human-machine continuity. Only humans, not machines, can “read” the inarticulable desires of the body, but those desires can’t be thought outside of a technological literacy – the “strength” which Case recognises in Linda is born in the “relentless street” but is manifest here in digital through the powerful AI Neuromancer. The ambiguity of what it means to read – only the body can read a body, but here finds strength in a digital body – seems to create fertile ground for radical thinking about being (about ontology). Perhaps, for instance, desire could be conceived of without a binary of body/machine, and then without an anthropocentric notion of what constitutes sanctioned desire. The contradiction flesh presents to the digital could be retained as an emergent pleasure.

With this, Case becomes aware of the irony which conditions his way of thinking about the world: that while cyberspace enthusiastically attempts to jettison the body, as he desperately wants to, without the meat space, mocked by the cowboys, there is no cyberspace, no place from which to transcend. Digital bodily pleasure is physical bodily pleasure, despite the constant denigration of the physical body, and the sense that cyberspace is a transcendent project. But Neuromancer does not allow this irony to reconfigure the desiring, male subject. It does not persist, or manifest newly liminal pleasures, and as such reproduces a plastic cyborg position, which is only geographic or solely prosthetic (sublime, perhaps) rather than ontological. Any ironic realisation is subsumed, and used to reinforce patriarchal pleasure as a condition-of and goal-for the transcendental. The manner of going “beyond knowing”, whether by plugging into cyberspace or by pursuing desire in meat space, is limited by the conditions of the knowing it would seek to escape. This is confirmed by Case’s coherent reading of Linda, and the novel’s inability to see the situation of reading/unambiguous reading as a problem. Case and Linda have sex, “effecting the transmission of the old message”, a description which constructs Case’s desire as a form of reproductive/textual power, and seems to erase the sense that Linda is an uncertain digital construct. Case, concerned about what might be happening to him in this uncertain and unfamiliar cyberspace, then seeks out the boy incarnation of Neuromancer in order to better reach understanding. Linda tries to follow him, and is read as an object by Case, a now paradoxically tainted and human digital unfantasy: “She looked like one of the girls on Finn’s old magazines in Metro Holografix come to life, only she was tired and sad and human, the ripped costume pathetic as she stumbled over clumps of salt-silver sea grass.” (p.243) While the uncertainty of the human-machine continuum suggested a way of re-imagining desire, the only character who can attempt to articulate it is our frightened, post-coital male cowboy. Regardless of where a possible reader might be on the human-computer continuum, the problem of who is able to read and how they do so is left unaddressed. After all, the “information coded in spiral and pheromone” is only readable by the body if the subject has a body which is allowed to engage in a performance of reading. Linda Lee is denied this reading agency, she is transmitted to as a node rather than reciprocally receiving something which she is allowed to process or think. This is because she is simultaneously computer code and woman. She is unable to even attempt to know that she is a “ghost”, as the boy-AI Neuromancer labels her, confined by Case’s fear of her ontological undecideability. The gendered way of knowing in “reality”, manifest as a coherent and certain process of reading, dominates ways of knowing the virtual, and thus the novel denies Linda’s possible place as a positive cyborg subject/myth/monster.

The main female character in the novel, Molly, possesses far greater agency in the text than Linda, but her resonance is limited in the final pages. Molly is able to read the constant irony of the human/machine continuity which defines the world of Neuromancer with a competency commensurate to (or better than) Case’s. However, the possibilities for such reading agency to move “beyond knowing” are confined at the end of the novel. Her final textual presence is a paper note explaining that her and Case’s relationship is “TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME […] IT’S THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS”.(p.267) which Case literally screws up. The knowing irony in the pun and Molly’s pragmatic voice humorously puncture Case’s romantic-cowboy trajectory. Her rejection of a traditional heterosexual relationship in favour of retaining a fugitive technological literacy makes Molly into a more robustly Harawayan cyborg figure than Linda Lee, although one which the novel is ultimately unwilling to reproduce, threatening as it is to the frame of a traditionally-gendered subjectivity. Case’s romantic vision keeps Molly in the role as lost lover: “I never even found out what color her eyes were. She never showed me.” (p.268) The final line of the novel is not a celebration of what Molly might uncertainly represent – the possibility of new pleasures, hybrid and necessarily incoherent identities – but provides an image of the heterosexual male haunted by both versions of his frustrated desire for the female body. “He never saw Molly again” contains a lament for the fact that neither the techno-ghost Linda nor the cyborg-Molly allows for the retention of a stable masculine subject, because of the uncertainty they provoke in human-machine and gendered terms. Molly disappears, and the possibility of continuing to read gendered/machine relations anew is stopped; the novel is literally unable to move beyond the male reader/narrator towards a cyborg one. The final version of the AI Wintermute – physically present as male, The Finn – is tellingly one of total coherence. That he is “Nowhere. Everywhere […] the sum total of the works, the whole show” is something which another female character, 3Jane’s mother “couldn’t imagine.” Such coherence is the only outcome the masculine imagination could foresee. The novel finishes having reinforced a vision of virtuality which glorified the male cyborg, for Case is the counter-cultural analogue of the military-industrial superhuman, a hacker-romantic-hero. The text retreats from the very cyberspace which would accommodate the female cyborg and allow them to flourish, taking solace instead in a romantic fantasy, a reality of eternal recuperation. In the words of the AI “[t]hings aren’t different” in the end, things like being, or gender. “Things are things.” (p.270)